I'm interested in how you guys find music for your games. Particular questions:

- Where did you find your tracks?
- How many did you include?
- Did you create new tracks or license existing ones?
- What were the licensing terms you used? (IE: Did you pay a flat-fee up front, or offer a share of royalties?)

On the flip side, if you *don't* have music in your game, why did you decide to omit it?

Ingemar Wrote:For professional games, of course you hire a composer. But for small projects, how about playing around in Garageband?

Yeah, Garageband has some very good music in it. The separately purchasable sound packs have even more scores of beats, sequences and melodies to choose from. I created all the music for Touch Attack in Garageband.

If you have a little bit of a budget, there are lots of talented musicians out there who are looking to build their portfolios and work for semi-pro costs.

Originally to save time I paid a flat-fee to license music for my 1st game. It was pretty costly and limited how many tracks I ended up using. So in future I plan to sacrifice a lot of my time over money and use Garageband as it is just such a great music creation tool.

Something definitely worth mentioning is that some people will allow you to use their music for free if you ask nicely enough and give them a plug in your game like their website along with their name in the credits.

A misconception in small-budget games is that audio can't play as much of a role to enhance gameplay and atmosphere as it does in larger games. I strongly advocate for a polished, thought-out and cohesive soundscape despite scale.

In fact I recently gave a talk at Trios College very much to this topic. Indie games are a source of some of the most creativity and innovation in the industry. They deserve no less from their audio designers.

If you look in the right places you can still get quality audio assets on a small-scale for a small budget.

Pretty much agree with HMaudio... Speaking of the App Store in particular, there's a lot of stock music and art on there. I've lost count of how many games use the 3DRT zombie pack, and I saw a thread at touch arcade recently were users were confused as to why games from different developers had the exact same music. Bottom line: If you want to stand out you need custom stuff.

Garage band can be OK in a pinch (I used it for my flOOid trailers) but a decent sound guy can slap together a custom soundtrack in less than a week - a song a day isn't an unreasonable request. Hell even I wrote 4 (and-a-half) 1 minute tracks for my game Pollywog in less than 3 days (can hear some in the trailer). Someone who does this sort of thing for a living can crank out better stuff in half the time.

You can just go through Apple Loops and play with them in Garageband, Soundtrack, etc. If you have the software, you already have a huge library of sound and music that you can use. Also consider recording some foley by wandering with a microphone and a recorder.

If you like, I have a game music portfolio with a lot of music that has never been used in games yet since I am quite new in the business.

I work 100% with music writing and my goal is that even indie game developers should be able to afford my music. Professional agencies charges 250$ for some of my tracks, which is a bit too expensive for indie game devs. I will license my music to you for down to 10$-100$ per song. I love to see indie game developers come up with creative ideas and fresh thinking, so I would like to help by contributing my music very cheap to your games.

Many of my services are completely free to you indie game devs, such as fitting a specific piece or cutting out a loop. I would do that for no extra cost. So ... all my songs can be re-worked, re-mastered, changed, improved, prolonged and cut - free of cost. New songs will be composed upon request. It is easy for me to cut out and rework short snippets from my full songs, e.g. if you want a Quest Complete from my song "Victory and Peace" or a Game Over snippet from "Day of the Great Battle".
I can do these adaptions for no extra cost, and the snippet will then be much cheaper.

No matter what, you are always welcome to my site to enjoy all my music, completely free for private listening. Maybe it can inspire you to make a great game! :-)

My most recent projects include:
- In-game tune for a coming FPS game (August 2010)
- Dark ghostly song for promotion of an RPG related book (August 2010)
- Dark gothic, aggressive style song for the promotion video of the board game RPG Stregoneria (July 2010)
- Fantasy title song and in-game tune for an indie game, released for iPad (July 2010)
- Music (fantasy/baroque style) for a 3D lab visualization of the city of Malmoe year 1692.
... and more stuff. :-)

Best Regards and Best of Luck with Your Games!
/Christian Andersson, Email: craze@craze.se